Tenant Screening
Helping Florida Landlords Effectively Screen Tenants
Avoid High-Risk Occupants
As a landlord, it’s important you do everything you can to research the background of potential tenants so you can avoid bringing in a high-risk occupant. This is true for both residential and commercial landlords—in either case, you’re going to want to protect the investment you’ve made in your property.
Knowing this, many landlords choose to perform tenant screening processes before they approve the rental application of a potential tenant. These screenings will include credit reports, eviction reports and criminal background checks all together in one convenient package to help make it easier for landlords to make their rental decisions.
At Palm Beach Mobile Notary & Fingerprinting, we’re pleased to work with a variety of landlords throughout Florida to perform tenant background checks and eviction lookups. Here’s a bit more information about why this is such a crucial service for landlords and why you should contact PBN to get started with your tenant screening process.
What Makes Tenant Screening So Important?
Landlords should do everything they can to take the unknown out of a rental situation.
Here are just a few of the biggest reasons why tenant screening is a solid investment:
Guard Against Liability
Any landlord opens themselves up to potential liability issues by virtue of renting out their properties. It’s better to minimize the potential liability issues you face by only renting to trustworthy people. Say, for example, you don’t perform a criminal background check and it turns out the tenant has a history of theft, then begins stealing from other people in your building. You could be liable in negligence lawsuits following such an incident.
Keep Everyone Safe
While it’s good to think of protecting yourself and your investment, it’s also important to protect your community and all the tenants you have who live in it. You have a responsibility as a landlord not to expose your tenants to danger, and part of that means keeping out people who could put them at risk of harm.
Verify Provided Information
Your application will require potential tenants to list information about criminal history, yes, but also about income. Proof of income is important as it ensures you that your tenant will be able to make their rental payments every month. Taking some steps to verify this information during the application process can save you a whole lot of headache down the line.
Reduce Turnover
By performing tenant background checks, you’ll be able to bring in high-quality tenants who are more likely to stay for the long term. This also ensures other people in your building will stick around longer because there won’t be neighbor-related issues that encourage them to move.
Filter Out Low Quality Tentants
Would-be applicants with a shaky background who know that you are going to perform a tenant background check will be less likely to apply in the first place, allowing you to focus your energy on high-quality prospects you want to be your tenants.
Why PBN is Best Suited for Your Tenant Screening Processes
Palm Beach Mobile Notary & Fingerprinting works with landlords across Florida to complete their tenant background checks and give them the confidence they need to move forward with an applicant. As a small, local company, we’re able to create tighter bonds with our clients, which is especially beneficial for landlords who own smaller or fewer properties and prefer a more personalized touch.
We also have a staff that carefully combs through all of the data received after performing background checks so we only send you the information that is pertinent and relevant to your needs. Other, larger companies simply send all the data your way without any annotations or clarifications, but we believe that’s an unhelpful way of doing business, especially for landlords who don’t have the time to mine all of that data for information that’s actually of use to them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are a few examples of some of the questions we most commonly get asked about tenant screening in Florida:
Are evictions public record?
For a person to be evicted, their landlord must have obtained a civil judgment against them in court. These court records containing these judgments are able to be publicly searched. Landlords who perform their own searches will likely scan public records for applicants’ names, but a more effective way of performing the search and getting accurate information is to work with a professional tenant screening company to make sure the search is performed as thoroughly as possible.
How long do tenant screenings take?
In general, you can expect it to take up to two to three days for a tenant background check to be completed. It’s a good idea to advise applicants of this when they turn in their forms so they can be aware of how much time to expect the confirmation process to take. In some cases it may take slightly longer if there are more issues that arise in the background check that need to be researched and put into context.
What do tenant screenings show?
When you get your tenant screening report back, you will see information including an overview of the applicant’s credit, a criminal report (if any crimes exist on the applicant’s record) and reports of any evictions that may have occurred in the applicant’s past. All of this information is helpful for landlords who may be choosing among multiple applicants for a property.